« Previous post
Next post »

August 21, 2006

Heads Roll At AOL, Including CTO

Michael Arrington

39 comments »

The heads are rolling at AOL over the recent search engine data clusterfuck (see here, here, here and here).

CTO Maureen Govern and two other employees are now history. John McKinley, AOL’s former CTO, will take over on an interim basis. See here and John Paczkowski for more.

From my discussion with Andrew Weinstein, the AOL spokesperson who apologized on behalf of AOL after the data dump, my understanding is that this entire event was caused by a single clueless researcher and a complete lack of oversight by his managers. Hopefully these firings are tied to the actual people responsible and not just for the sake of holding someone, anyone, responsible.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 11:28 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Jimmy Daniels » AOL Releases CTO and Two Others for Data Leak

    August 21st, 2006 at 12:38 pm

  2. Zoli's Blog

    August 21st, 2006 at 2:45 pm

  3. eConectados » Archivo del blog » Y obviamente rodaron cabezas

    August 21st, 2006 at 2:48 pm

  4. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » AOLでくび続出

    August 21st, 2006 at 4:25 pm

  5. Technoogle » Blog Archive » Heads Roll at AOL over Data Disclosure

    August 21st, 2006 at 7:59 pm

  6. Life is a venture » Blog Archive » The email that started the AOL search data firestorm

    August 21st, 2006 at 10:06 pm

  7. IT Blogwatch

    August 22nd, 2006 at 2:52 am

  8. 23rd World » AOL - Bad News All Around

    August 22nd, 2006 at 4:43 pm

  9. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » AOL’s Snazzy New Private Information Gatherer

    October 4th, 2006 at 8:00 pm

  10. AOL’s New Private Information Gatherer » JenIT

    October 11th, 2006 at 8:49 am

  11. AOL’s New Private Information Harvester » JenIT

    October 11th, 2006 at 8:54 am

  12. compare prices of lamisil in columbia tn

    March 11th, 2007 at 11:28 am

  13. female viagra alternative

    March 19th, 2007 at 11:52 am

  14. effects from side viagra

    May 2nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Timothy

    August 21st, 2006 at 12:03 pm

    Have you seen the http://evaal.com search engine? It looks like a Google Killer

  2. Ted

    August 21st, 2006 at 12:10 pm

    Oh yeah, definitely Google-killer there. I expect Google will be dead in a few days. No Spam Comments!

  3. Larry

    August 21st, 2006 at 12:38 pm

    “clusterfuck” Yeah, that’s good news-reporting grammar.

  4. Mike

    August 21st, 2006 at 12:41 pm

    But it was the perfect word to describe the situation.

  5. Timothy

    August 21st, 2006 at 12:43 pm

    Ted why do you sound sarcastic, are you one of those who believe Google is God? Well this is the internet and things do change overnight sometimes

  6. NeoTechie

    August 21st, 2006 at 1:16 pm

    In the past weeks, AOL has had many unhappy customers. AOL remember without your customers you would not be on line so long. AOL clean up your act before it is too late. If you don’t have customers, then you don’t have profits. To AOL and other big dogs, keep us happy or we will go elsewhere for trustworthy services.

    ~Concerned Customer

  7. Amrit Hallan

    August 21st, 2006 at 1:31 pm

    Well, do people really use AOL for search? Long ago I used to use Yahoo!, then AltaVista, even Hotbot, and eventually, 70% of the time Google, 25% of the time Yahoo! and 5% of the time MSN. Never AOL.

  8. Timothy

    August 21st, 2006 at 1:53 pm

    Amrit Hallan,
    What about a search engine such as evaal that shares revenue with Users and by introducing the human factor increase search efficiency by more than half

  9. Wow

    August 21st, 2006 at 1:55 pm

    Evaal is awesome. I have seen “the promise land of search.”

    http://evaal.com/tour/evaal.html

    Google is history! Web 2.0 search is here!

  10. Nick Lothian

    August 21st, 2006 at 3:26 pm

    “From my discussion with Andrew Weinstein, the AOL spokesperson who apologized on behalf of AOL after the data dump, my understanding is that this entire event was caused by a single clueless researcher and a complete lack of oversight by his managers.”

    I’ve heard another version. Erik Selberg (from MSN search) talked to some of the AOL researchers at SIGIR and has said:

    “you had better believe they had a reasonable amount of sign-off from people inside of AOL”

    http://www.selberg.org/2006/08.....ntroversy/

  11. Ryan W.

    August 21st, 2006 at 3:31 pm

    Mike, can you please ban this timothy guy or something?

    Timothy: How can I sign up to be an expert on the subject of building poor websites and spamming online communities for lack of decent marketing ideas? Hopefully you’ll search for that and I can give you some “advice.”

  12. Zoli Erdos

    August 21st, 2006 at 4:01 pm

    Gee, I didn’t expect the Technorati Tag “clusterfuck” to be so popular :-)

  13. Big Perm

    August 21st, 2006 at 4:53 pm

    AOL is in bad shape. They are a PR nightmare and their service is terrible

  14. Big Perm

    August 21st, 2006 at 4:54 pm

    btw
    evaal
    sux

  15. Kevin Burton

    August 21st, 2006 at 5:18 pm

    OK everyone… time to googlebomb aol.com with the term “clusterfuck”

    :)

  16. Bob

    August 21st, 2006 at 6:03 pm

    People still want google. They just want it without the privacy invading user tracking scam. If you could have that for free then why not? Try this one.

    Theres only like 20 search proxies out there but this one is just simple.

    http://www.blackboxsearch.com

  17. Bill

    August 21st, 2006 at 6:05 pm

    Nice language…..

  18. Dillon Thomas

    August 21st, 2006 at 6:18 pm

    What AOL did was a disgrace. Its good to see some internal changes.
    Timothy, if your site looks like a Google killer, why hasn’t it been featured on techcrunch?. “If it ain’t been techcrunched, it ain’t worth using”. With regard to your site I’ve only ever seen it on here as spam comments.

  19. Small Perm

    August 21st, 2006 at 6:55 pm

    “PR nightmare”. I’d agree with that. It should have been Andrew Weinstein that got canned.

  20. Search Engines WEB ۞

    August 21st, 2006 at 7:00 pm

    This is terribly WRONG to fire people over this incident :-(

    Sure, that data should have been password/ log-in protected……BUT, this situation itself, is an abberation!

    How often does this ocurr?????

    The players involved ARE qualified - or else, they would NOT have been hired, in this very competative market.

    The players are SKILLED or else they would not have held their jobs!

    People CAN learn from mistakes, or communication breakdowns, especially when the circumstances -themselves - are very unusual.

    Ironically, having learned from this episode would probably have made everyone involved more capable as employees.

    This IS obviously a Public Relations (scapegoat) ploy………….come now, are the new hirees going to be MORE qualified or skilled than those terminated. :D

    Checks will be put in place, so that even those EQUALLY qualified replacements will never have the opportunity of make THOSE mistakes……but, statistically they have the same liklihood of making others, where loopholes exist. :?

  21. Cruncher

    August 21st, 2006 at 7:12 pm

    But somebody did not do their job proper.That is how the data was released.

  22. Baher

    August 21st, 2006 at 8:00 pm

    Let’s hope that they got fired because they deserve it, and not only as a way for AOL to get some of its reputation back, for dealing so strictly with privacy violations.

  23. Bryan

    August 21st, 2006 at 8:07 pm

    Do people still use aol? That’s sad. Maybe this little episode will help people realize this.

  24. Anshul

    August 21st, 2006 at 8:40 pm

    This was bound to happen. With so much bad press that AOL got, they had to do something to negate that. Though firing the CTO might not help much, it could just calm the normal user that AOL takes data breaches seriously.

  25. rxbbx

    August 21st, 2006 at 10:11 pm

    It thought it was a problem with their own system? Anyhow.. fire some people is not a solution, it makes them only weaker.

« Previous post
Next post »